Private investment in the countryside: an assessment of the role of new houses and estates in sustaining the rural economy and environment

The British countryside has been shaped and sustained over the years by the establishment of landed estates. Some of our best known, and now most protected, landmarks derive from this tradition by which money, that was often sourced from outside the rural economy, was invested in land. Whilst there was some reversal in this trend during the last century, there is again a widespread desire among people of means to invest in new country property. Paragraph 3.21 of Planning Policy Guidance Note 7: The Countryside - Environmental Quality and Economic and Social Development was introduced in 1997 as a means of perpetuating the historic tradition of innovation in the countryside through the construction of fine individual houses in landscaped grounds. That it was considered necessary to use a special provision of this kind reflects the prevailing presumption of planning authorities against allowing private residential development in open countryside. The Government is currently reviewing rural planning policy and is focusing on higher density housing, affordable homes and the use of brownfield sites. There is an underlying conception that individual private house developments contribute nothing and are seen as the least attractive option for most development sites. The purpose of paragraph 3.21 lies outside the government’s priorities and its particular provisions may therefore be excluded in forthcoming ‘policy statements’. This paper seeks to examine the role of private investors wishing to build new houses in the countryside, and the impact that that might have on local economies. It explores the interpretation placed on PPG7 through an investigation of appeal sites, and concludes by making recommendations for the review process, including the retention of some form of exceptions policy for new build houses.

The loss of Normandy and the invention of Terre Normannorum, 1204

The conquest of Normandy by Philip Augustus of France effectively ended the ‘Anglo-Norman’ realm created in 1066, forcing cross-Channel landholders to choose between their English and their Norman estates. The best source for the resulting tenurial upheaval in England is the Rotulus de valore terrarum Normannorum, a list of seized properties and their former holders, and this article seeks to expand our understanding of the impact of the loss of Normandy through a detailed analysis of this document. First, it demonstrates that the compilation of the roll can be divided into two distinct stages, the first containing valuations taken before royal justices in June 1204 and enrolled before the end of July, and the second consisting of returns to orders for the valuation of particular properties issued during the summer and autumn, as part of the process by which these estates were committed to new holders. Second, study of the roll and other documentary sources permits a better understanding of the order for the seizure of the lands of those who had remained in Normandy, the text of which does not survive. This establishes that this royal order was issued in late May 1204 and, further, that it enjoined the temporary seizure rather than the permanent confiscation of these lands. Moreover, the seizure was not retrospective and covers a specific window of time in 1204. On the one hand, this means that the roll is far from a comprehensive record of terre Normannorum. On the other hand, it is possible to correlate the identities of those Anglo-Norman landholders whose English estates were seized with the military progress of the French king through the duchy in May and June and thus shed new light on the campaign of 1204. Third, the article considers the initial management of the seized estates and highlights the fact that, when making arrangements for the these lands, John was primarily concerned to maintain his freedom of manoeuvre, since he was not prepared to accept that Normandy had been lost for good.

How often does direct real estate increase the risk-adjusted performance of the US mixed-asset portfolio?

The “case for real estate” in the mixed-asset portfolio is a topic of continuing interest to practitioners and academics. The argument is typically made by comparing efficient frontiers of portfolio with real estate to those that exclude real estate. However, most investors will have held inefficient portfolios. Thus, when analysing the real estate’s place in the mixed-asset portfolio it seems illogical to do so by comparing the difference in risk-adjusted performance between efficient portfolios, which few if any investor would have held. The approach adopted here, therefore, is to compare the risk-adjusted performance of a number of mixed-asset portfolios without real estate (which may or not be efficient) with a very large number of mixed-asset portfolios that include real estate (which again may or may not be efficient), to see the proportion of the time when there is an increase in risk-adjusted performance, significant or otherwise using appraisal-based and de-smoothed annual data from 1952-2003. So to the question how often does the addition of private real estate lead to increases the risk-adjusted performance compared with mixed-asset portfolios without real estate the answer is almost all the time. However, significant increases are harder to find. Additionally, a significant increase in risk-adjusted performance can come from either reductions in portfolio risk or increases in return depending on the investors’ initial portfolio structure. In other words, simply adding real estate to a mixed-asset portfolio is not enough to ensure significant increases in performance as the results are dependent on the percentage added and the proper reallocation of the initial portfolio mix in the expanded portfolio.

Internal rents and corporate property management: a study into the use of internal rents in UK corporate organisations

Research in the late 1980s showed that in many corporate real estates users were not fully aware of the full extent of their property holdings. In many cases, not only was the value of the holdings unknown, but there was uncertainty over the actual extent of ownership within the portfolio. This resulted in a large number of corporate occupiers reviewing their property holdings during the 1990s, initially to create a definitive asset register, but also to benefit from an more efficient use of space. Good management of corporately owned property assets is of equal importance as the management of other principal resources within the company. A comprehensive asset register can be seen as the first step towards a rational property audit. For the effective, efficient and economic delivery of services, it is vital that all property holdings are utilised to the best advantage. This requires that the property provider and the property user are both fully conversant with the value of the property holding and that an asset/internal rent/charge is made accordingly. The advantages of internal rent charging are twofold. Firstly, it requires the occupying department to “contribute” an amount to the business equivalent to the open market rental value of the space that it occupies. This prevents the treating of space as a free good and, as individual profit centres, each department will then rationalise its holdings to minimise its costs. The second advantage is from a strategic viewpoint. By charging an asset rent, the holding department can identify the performance of its real estate holdings. This can then be compared to an internal or external benchmark to help determine whether the company has adopted the most efficient tenure pattern for its properties. This paper investigates the use of internal rents by UK-based corporate businesses and explains internal rents as a form of transfer pricing in the context of management and responsibility accounting. The research finds that the majority of charging organisations introduced internal rents primarily to help calculate true profits at the business unit level. However, less than 10% of the charging organisations introduced internal rents primarily to capture the return on assets within the business. There was also a sizeable element of the market who had no plans to introduce internal rents. Here, it appears that, despite academic and professional views that internal rents are beneficial in improving the efficient use of property, opinion at the business and operational level has not universally accepted this proposition.

Who owned Earls Colne in 1798....or how to squeeze more from the Land Tax

In this important article Richard Hoyle, one of the country’s leading historians of the early modern period, introduces new perspectives on the Land Tax and its use in the analysis of local communities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He uses as his case study the parish of Earls Colne in Essex, on which he has already written extensively with Professor Henry French. The article begins with an overview of the tax itself, explaining its history and the procedures for the collection of revenues – including the numerous changes which took place. The sizeable problems confronting any would-be analyst of the data are clearly identified, and Hoyle observes that because of these apparently insoluble difficulties the potential of the tax returns has never been fully realised. He then considers the surviving documentation in The National Archives, providing an accessible introduction to the sources and their arrangement, and describing the particularly important question o f the redemption of the tax by payment of a lump sum. The extent of redemption (in the years around 1800-1804) is discussed. Hoyle draws attention to the potential for linking the tax returns themselves with the redemption certificates (which have never been subjected to historical analysis and thereby proposes new ways of exploiting the evidence of the taxation as a whole. The article then discusses in detail the specific case of Earls Colne, with tabulated data showing the research potential. Topics analysed include the ownership of property ranked by size of payment, and calculations whereby the amount paid may be used to determine the worth of land and the structure of individual estates. The important question of absentee owners is investigated, and there is a very valuable consideration of the potential for looking at portfolio estate ownership, whereby owners held land in varying proportions in a number of parishes. It is suggested that such studies will allow us to be more aware of the entirety of property ownership, which a focus on a single community does not permit. In the concluding paragraph it is argued that using these sources we may see the rise and fall of estates, gain new information on landownership, landholding and farm size, and even approach the challenging topic of the distribution of wealth.

The relationship between European Community agricultural Structural Policies and their implementation and agricultural succession and inheritance within Member States

This paper presents an overview of the European Union involvement in agricultural restructuring. By way of introduction it looks at the processes of farm replication operating in Europe and the forces behind them. It then considers the wider application of EU measures in each Member State and how they interrelate with the national property laws and social customs. In conclusion the paper appraises the restructuring policies by examining the balance between legitimising the concentration of property rights amongst a minority and the fragmentation of estates between the majority.

Predicting the annual performance of UK real estate: timeliness versus coverage

The IPD Annual Index is the largest and most comprehensive Real Estate market index available in the UK Such coverage however inevitably leads to delays in publication. In contrast there are a number of quarterly and monthly indices which are published within days of the year end but which lack the coverage in terms of size and numbers of properties. This paper analyses these smaller but more timely indices to see whether such indices can be used to predict the performance of the IPD Annual Index. Using a number of measures of forecasting accuracy it is shown that the smaller indices provide unbiased and efficient predictions of the IPD Annual Index. Such indices also significantly outperform a naive no-change model. Although no one index performs significantly better than the others. The more timely indices however do not perfectly track the IPD Annual Index. As a result any short run predictions of performance will be subject to a degree of error. Nevertheless the more timely indices, although lacking authoritative coverage, provide a valuable service to investors giving good estimates of Real Estates performance well before the publication of the IPD Annual Index.